Jim Panttaja

Last month, Scott Thurm wrote an article in the Wall Street Journal titled Now, It’s Business By Data, but Numbers Still Can’t Tell Future. The article discusses how a number of companies are managing by the numbers. But he points out, “Running a complex enterprise can’t be reduced to a spreadsheet, however.”

In the early 1970s I was working as a contractor for the Oakland Public Schools data processing department. I was writing (and fixing) Fortan and Cobol programs, supporting some old 1401 applications, and serving as a liaison with the statistics department. One September, enrollment took a dive. It was the first year that enrollment had decreased year over year. For a school district (as I recall Oakland was something like the fifth largest in the nation), declining enrollment is devastating to budgets. So they asked me to help them model (predict) what the next years enrollment would be. I spent a bunch of time using various curve fitting techniques to come up with the best estimate I could of the next years enrollment. The statistics department was thrilled - and prepared to take their numbers to the board.

The problem was - none of these techniques applied a year earlier would have predicted the decline that we saw. To me that proved that my methodology could not be trusted. The statisticians were happy to have an ‘answer’ and ignored my concerns.

That is not to say that I don’t like to look at the numbers. I love numbers. But I have learned to take them with a grain of salt.